Listening to playlists on YouTube is a great way to check out new music for free, but you have to keep your browser open and you have to watch a bunch of ads. If you'd like a cleaner experience, tech blog Digital Inspiration shows how to play playlists in the VLC media player.

We've shown you how to play individual YouTube videos in VLC before, but that method doesn't work for playlists. For playlists, you'll need the VLC add-on YouTube Video and Playlist Importer installed. Once it's installed, simply copy the playlist URL from your browser, then hit CTRL+N in VLC, select the Network box, and paste the playlist URL. The playlist automatically gets imported into VLC where you can use any keyboard shortcuts you have set up to watch playlists ad-free.